Star Wars has a villain problem. Don’t get us wrong, the franchise excels at creating bad guys: Darth Vader, for instance, is one of the most beloved antagonists ever put on screen. But while this seven-foot-tall onyx demon was originally introduced as evil incarnate — his first act onscreen is lifting a full-sized adult man off the floor by his throat, one-handed — Lucasfilm eventually gave him a super lame backstory. All of the Sith Lord’s onscreen badassery gets derailed the moment you find out he was once a whiny kid who used to run around calling stuff “Wizard!”
Videos by ComicBook.com
And it’s not just Darth Vader. Every time the Star Wars Universe gives its heroes a worthy adversary, it has to demystify them with an unnecessary backstory. Boba Fett used to be a mysterious figure with a design for the ages, but Star Wars wasn’t content with letting the character coast along on his iconic looks, while fans speculated about the evildoer behind the armor. Instead, the franchise chose to explain him into mediocrity. Now, with the recent release of Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, it’s Cad Bane’s turn to lose a cool point or two with a banal origin.
Star Wars Just Did It to Cad Bane
Bane’s story starts with the infamous bounty hunter as — what else — a kid. From there, in true Star Wars fashion, viewers are spoon-fed little details like where Bane got his hat and why he carries two blasters instead of one — you know, details absolutely no fans were clamoring for. Ironically, the one thing that would have been nice to know, how the name Colby became Cad, isn’t explained in the slightest. Of course, making Cad’s birth-name “Colby” is a detail that adds nothing to the character.
Origin stories in general are kryptonite for villains. Michael Myers is scary because you have no idea what is going on behind those black, soulless eyes. Giving him motivation like a sister or an abusive childhood makes him too relatable, and once he’s relatable, he loses the power to inspire fear. Likewise, the Joker is best when he’s a nameless force of chaos – justifying his insanity with a sad backstory completely kills the character’s vibe.
Giving a great villain a tragic backstory dilutes their villainy and makes them hard to root against. Shades of grey in a realistic drama are fine, but Star Wars is, at its core, a fairy tale, and fairy tales are allowed to be black and white. Fans shouldn’t have to look at a villain who just had his own daughter tortured for information, and be forced to weigh his evil deed against the sad way he lost his own mother.
[RELATED: Star Wars is Wasting Darth Maul’s Potential & Needs to Fix It]
It’s Not Just Villains
To be fair, Star Wars tends to overexplain everything, not just villains. Every single Star Wars fan who’s seen Star Wars: A New Hope has walked away scratching their heads, wondering, “Where did Luke get that toy spaceship he plays with in that one scene?” Just kidding, no one in the history of creation has ever asked that question, but the 2022 Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ series gave us an answer anyway. But it’s one thing to answer questions nobody was asking. Taking a bounty hunter that fans love, specifically for his uniqueness, and giving him hundreds of thousands of siblings and a dad who dresses just like him is another thing entirely.
In Boba Fett’s case, having a backstory is especially egregious, considering he was based on Clint Eastwood’s iconic character, the “Man with No Name.” Over the course of three loosely connected Spaghetti Westerns, Eastwood played the kind of gunslinger who wanders into town with no history, no baggage, and leaves a few days later the same way he came in. No character development, no emotional growth, just an outlaw who kicks butt, takes names and looks rad as hell while doing it.
Even after the Star Wars Prequels made Boba Fett just another dude, fans had the perfect Spaghetti Western villain in Cad Bane (who coincidentally was based on another character from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), at least they did, until Lucasfilm saddled him with his own cliched, trauma-filled childhood.
Less is always more when it comes to antiheroes and villains. The simple fact is that a villain you know will never be as scary as the villain you don’t know. It will always be more fun imagining your own gruesome scenario for how Anakin Skywalker fell to the dark side and became Vader, rather than knowing it was essentially a series of bad dreams that left him triggered. If Star Wars cares about its villains, it needs to leave them in the shadows more often, instead of putting them in the spotlight.
Unfortunately, fandoms have gotten in the habit of producing so much content that delving into the backstories of popular characters is now a question of when, not if. So while it would be great for Star Wars to stop doing deep dives into the history of their bad guys, it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.
If you need us, we’ll be over here anxiously waiting for Disney to announce a young Jabba the Hutt miniseries – maybe after this new series that puts Maul in the spotlight.
Star Wars content streams on Disney+. ,
